"He married her to keep her from getting away. Now she's there all day."
-Philip Larkin, Romanticynical Poet
This sentiment, equally applicable to men as to women, is as good a place as any to start a blog dedicated to love, romance, and sex as they really are-not the pure joy the romantics promise, nor the pure hell the cynics predict.
The Romantic says: I can't help falling in love. Love is as true a feeling as I've ever known. Merging with my beloved feels as true as falling into bed when exhausted, drinking cool water when parched, swallowing that first delicious bite when famished. Love completes me. It makes life worth living. It puts me in worthier possession of my soul. It polishes my rough edges and makes me a better person. People who can't or don't love are at risk of losing their warmth, of becoming bitter and desiccated, in fact, of dying young.* We're a pair-bonding species. We're meant to couple, which is why almost everyone does. Sure, love takes compromise, but it's worth it. It's more than worth it. It builds character. Love is fulfilling. Just look at all the happily married senior citizens. Contrast that with going it alone, no one to be there for you when you're feeling low or you hit hard times. We all need someone to care for us and to care for. So love? Of course, what could be more true, natural, and good? And besides, I can't live without it.
And the Cynic says: Love is a dangerous and expensive drug I'm best off avoiding or at least limiting. It's addictive and makes me believe and tell fictions. It's motivated by a weak-willed appetite for co-dependency. The formula is as simple as it is simple-minded. I find the most attractive person who is willing to create a mutual admiration society with me, someone who will say untrue things about how exceptional I am so long as I reciprocate. We keep the mutual admiration society going as long as we can ignore the evidence, and when it fails, we exit uncomfortably-or we stick with it uncomfortably, intertwined as tightly as when we were in love though now it compromises us. Love is often an enjoy-now, pay-later commitment. It's the lure that hooks us on a heavy-duty line that in the long run will yank us to and fro until we're all played out. Love squeezes us into the irrelevant mold of society's implicit obligation to marry, combined with our beloved's demands. So why do we fall for it? More often than not, it's looks, that most pervasive of prejudices whereby pretty people are deemed to be worth more. Love is a tawdry lookist cult of personality touted as something fine and glorious.
And they're both right, in a way. Perhaps these statements exaggerate, but as extremes they define a continuum that you may have found yourself sliding along at one time or another.
Love heals; love stinks; love falls everywhere in between.
Ambigamists are ambivalent about love, sex, romance, and marriage. They are of these two minds, which makes them (us) a bit more complicated than pure cynics or pure romantics. We commit, but slowly or haltingly. We claim to be beyond falling in love, but we do it anyway. We get a reputation for being afraid to love, or for taking the whole thing too casually. We're mistaken for players, loose women, ladies' men, egomaniacs with too high a standard.
And yet there is dignity to be had in ambigamy. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to act."
What makes it so first-rate? Two opposite ideas often reflect reality more accurately than one idea can. Nowhere is this truer than in love-which really does often heal and often stink.
Also, holding two opposite ideas encourages flexibility. This is a central point in the Brafman brothers' 2008 book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, in which they report on experiments that show how in groups, the presence of a single dissenting voice frees other members to express themselves more independently and honestly.
As in groups, so too in individual minds. Internal unanimity-being of one mind about something-can make people dogmatic, stubborn, and blind. Holding two opposite ideas at once makes us more responsive and adaptive, staying with the loves that heal and getting out of the loves that stink in a way that the pure romantic or the pure cynic can't.
Holding two opposite ideas is not a matter of finding the right blend or happy medium between the opposites. With some pursuits you can adjust your level of involvement to suit your mixture of motives. With love as with pregnancy, however, there's not a lot of middle ground. Honoring your doubts by being halfway committed to a romantic partnership is usually unsustainable. The opposites stay opposites. An ambigamist entertains sentiments as resistant to each other as oil and water.
"Build it to last 100 years; be ready to leave tomorrow." This old Quaker saying conveys the difficulty. Romance commits us for 100 years; cynicism prepares us to leave tomorrow. The more ready you are to leave the less likely you'll build to last; the more you build to last, the less ready you are to leave.
So what's an ambigamist to do? Well, that's just what we'll be exploring in this blog.
*Singles don't tend to live as long as married people. A 2006 study from the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health showed that never-married people were 58 percent more likely to die earlier than an age-matched group of married people. Divorced or separated people were 27 percent more likely to die earlier than married people.
